This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

Take Down the Confederate Flag—Now

Last night, Dylann
Roof walked into a Charleston church, sat for an hour, and then killed
nine people. Roof’s crime cannot be divorced from the ideology of white
supremacy which long animated his state nor from its potent symbol—the
Confederate flag. Visitors to Charleston have long been treated to South
Carolina’s attempt to clean its history and depict its secession as
something other than a war to guarantee the enslavement of the majority
of its residents. This notion is belied by any serious interrogation of
the Civil War and the primary documents of its instigators. Yet the
Confederate battle flag—the flag of Dylann Roof—still flies on the Capitol grounds in Columbia.
The Confederate flag’s defenders often claim it represents
“heritage not hate.” I agree—the heritage of White Supremacy was not so
much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. Dylann Roof
plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different
families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a
singular member. An entire people are poorer for his action. The flag
that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand
in opposition to this act—it endorses it. That the Confederate flag is
the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea;
its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth
that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination
to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new
government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this
great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

This moral truth—“that
the negro is not equal to the white man”—is exactly what animated Dylann
Roof. More than any individual actor, in recent history, Roof honored
his flag in exactly the manner it always demanded—with human sacrifice. Surely
the flag’s defenders will proffer other, muddier, interpretations which
allow them the luxury of looking away. In this way they honor their
ancestors. Cowardice, too, is heritage. When white supremacist John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago, Booth’s fellow travelers did all they could to disassociate themselves.
“Our disgust for the dastardly wretch can scarcely be uttered,” fumed a
former governor of South Carolina, the state where secession began.
Robert E. Lee’s armies took special care to enslave free blacks during
their Northern campaign. But Lee claimed the assassination of the Great Emancipator was “deplorable.” Jefferson Davis believed that “it could not be regarded otherwise than as a great misfortune to the South,” and angrily denied rumors that he had greeted the news with exultation.
Villain though he was, Booth was a man who understood the logical conclusion of Confederate rhetoric:

"TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN":
Right or wrong. God judge me, not man. For be my motive good or bad,
of one thing I am sure, the lasting condemnation of the North.
I love peace more than life. Have loved the Union beyond expression.
For four years have I waited, hoped and prayed for the dark clouds to
break, and for a restoration of our former sunshine. To wait longer
would be a crime. All hope for peace is dead. My prayers have proved as
idle as my hopes. God's will be done. I go to see and share the bitter
end….
I have ever held the South were right. The very nomination of ABRAHAM
LINCOLN, four years ago, spoke plainly, war—war upon Southern rights
and institutions….
This country was formed for the white, not for the black man. And
looking upon African Slavery from the same stand-point held by the noble
framers of our constitution. I for one, have ever considered if one of
the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us,) that God has ever
bestowed upon a favored nation. Witness heretofore our wealth and power;
witness their elevation and enlightenment above their race elsewhere. I
have lived among it most of my life, and have seen less harsh treatment
from master to man than I have beheld in the North from father to son.
Yet, Heaven knows, no one would be willing to do more for the negro race
than I, could I but see a way to still better their condition.

By 1865, the Civil War had morphed into a war against
slavery—the “cornerstone” of Confederate society. Booth absorbed his
lesson too well. He did not violate some implicit rule of Confederate
chivalry or politesse. He accurately interpreted the cause of Jefferson
Davis and Robert E. Lee, men who were too weak to truthfully address
that cause’s natural end.
Moral cowardice requires choice and action. It demands that
its adherents repeatedly look away, that they favor the fanciful over
the plain, myth over history, the dream over the real. Here is another
choice.

Take down the flag. Take it down now.
Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015.
Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death
and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.